Self-Organisation: A “Silver Bullet” for Creativity? Master’s thesis MSc in Social Sciences in Management of Creative Business Processes Authors (student number): Nils König (106404) & Nick Mikael Ahleskog (107272) Date of submission: 14th of May 2018 Supervisor: Christian De Cock Number of characters: 272,882 Number of pages: 120 Abstract This dissertation provides insight into how self-organisation as a system can foster creativity in an organisational context. Based on an extensive literature review, we selected a number of factors that influence creativity and related them to self-organisation, drawing on both existing self-organisation theories and our own implications. The research of this dissertation aims at examining whether and how those factors are fulfilled in real self- organised settings and how professional individuals and organisations deal with conflicts that self-organisation theoretically imposes on creativity. In addition, we address how different forms of self-organisation relate to creativity in varying ways. To do this, we conducted in-depth interviews with 13 employees from three different self-organised organisations, two of which we interpret as self-led (with high autonomy levels), and one as self-managed (with lower autonomy levels). The findings show that self-organisation as a system indeed has the potential to foster creativity. In some aspects, the studied organisations however struggle to fully utilise this potential and to transform it to actual creative behaviour. A final finding is that, according to our expectations, self-leadership has an even stronger positive influence on creativity compared to self-management. All results are critically discussed and managerial implications as to how occurring problems can be resolved are presented. Acknowledgments We would like to thank Christian De Cock, our supervisor at Copenhagen Business School who provided us with invaluable feedback, insight and encouragement during the thesis writing process. A special thank you also goes to the employees of the organisations studied in this dissertation, who gave up their valuable time from their busy schedules. Table of Content Introduction 1 1. Literature review 3 1.1 Self-organisation 3 1.1.1 What is self-organisation? 4 1.1.2 Self-management and self-leadership 6 1.1.3 Other bodies of literature closely related to self-organisation 8 1.1.4 In what situations is self-organisation appropriate? 8 1.1.5 Predictable outcomes of self-organisation 10 1.1.6 Supportive structures 13 1.1.7 Critique of self-organisation 17 1.2 Creativity 24 1.2.1 Creativity in context 25 1.2.2 Critical view on creativity 26 1.2.3 Creative outcomes 28 1.2.4 Influencing creativity 30 1.3 Self-organisation and creativity 31 1.3.1 The relationship between self-organisation and creativity 31 1.3.2 Problem formulation 39 2. Methodology 47 2.1 Justification of research design 47 2.2 Gap-spotting 50 2.3 Research design 52 2.3.1 Reasoning and preparation of interviews 52 2.3.2 Sampling 54 2.3.2 Company presentations 55 2.4 Conduction of interviews 60 2.5 Data Analysis 61 2.5.1 Deductive vs. inductive qualitative data analysis 61 2.5.2 First cycle coding 62 2.5.3 Second cycle coding 63 3. Analysis 64 3.1 Does self-organisation foster creativity? 64 3.1.1 Autonomy issues 65 3.1.2 A sense of ownership and control 67 3.1.3 Perceived shared responsibility 69 3.1.4 Risk, potential and decision making 70 3.1.5 Clarity of organisational goals 73 3.1.6 Feedback and non-monetary rewards 75 3.1.7 Knowledge management 77 3.1.8 Communication 79 3.1.9 Lack of formal leadership 84 3.1.10 Workload pressures 86 3.1.11 Summary of analysis of RQ1 88 3.2 Self-organisation and creativity: Agency issues 90 3.3 Self-management, self-leadership and creativity 96 3.4 Critical evaluation of analysis 101 4. Discussion 103 4.1 Self-organisation provides the possibility for creativity 103 4.2 Creative potential and practiced creativity 106 4.3 Self-management, self-leadership and creativity 108 5. Limitations and future research 109 5.1 General limitations 109 5.2 Limitations of interviews and company choice 110 5.3 Suggestions for future research 111 6. Conclusion 113 List of tables Table 1 - Employee overview Turva 57 Table 2 - Employee overview TBO 59 Table 2 - Emplyee overview Goodplace 60 Introduction Organising in a decentralised way with high degrees of employee autonomy both within teams and across entire organisations has re-emerged as a fairly common leadership theme in the past decade, both in the academic literature (e.g. DiLiello & Houghton, 2006; Shimizu, 2012; Javed et al., 2017; Raelin, 2012) and as a practiced way of organising. More and more organisations engage in some sort of self-organising structures, ranging from small startups to large corporations with thousands of employees such as GORE and Red Hat (Dignan, 2015). Self-organisation is especially common in the technology industry and is talked about as “the future of software development” (Humphrey, 2015). It can be seen as a response to changing circumstances that dictate “a need for a shift of focus toward internal leadership skills that can help individuals make smart decisions in the absence of traditional external leadership” (DiLiello & Houghton, 2006: 320). Hand in hand with adapting to the increasing pressures of dynamic markets comes the need to innovate. The abilities of solving problems and creating ideas in a creative manner, both on the levels of teams and individuals, are crucial ingredients of an organisation’s innovative potential. This dissertation is an inquiry into how self-organisation as a system can foster such creative behaviours and outcomes. The characteristics of a self-organised way of organising have substantial similarities with what is generally regarded as factors fostering organisational creativity. The most prevalent of these are autonomy (e.g. Amabile, Conti, Coon, Lazenby & Herron, 1996; Woodman, Sawyer & Griffin, 1993) and intrinsic motivation (e.g. Woodman et al., 1993; Ford, 1996). A number of scholars have theorised and researched this relationship, and suggested that self-organisation indeed fosters creativity (e.g. DiLiello & Houghton, 2006; Muthusamy, Wheeler & Simmons, 2005; Pearce & Manz, 2005). Despite a fair amount of academic attention on this relationship, a number of critical theoretical conceptualisations have not received the empirical attention they deserve. The empirical research conducted has mainly focused on the most obvious factors, while important factors have been left unstudied. In addition to a trend of “cherry picking” factors, the literature on self-organisation suffers from isomorphism as various terms are sometimes used interchangeably (Markham & Markham, 1995; Langfred, 2000; Mills, 1983). As a 1 result, the issue of isomorphism is also present in the literature bridging self-organisation and creativity. In this dissertation we look into a number of factors, derived from theoretical conceptualisations, suggestions of previous research and implied factors that have not been studied before, that might pose possible conflicts or issues in how self-organisation as a system influences creativity. In addition, we address the issue of isomorphism by carrying out an inquiry on how different forms of self-organisation relate to creative potential and creative outcomes. This is done by analysing interviews with employees from three, to various degrees self-organised organisations. This dissertation consists of six parts: literature review, methodology, analysis, discussion, limitations and conclusion. In the literature review we discuss the main theories and research conducted of the two central components of this dissertation: self-organisation and creativity. In the final section of that chapter we discuss these concepts in conjunction and review the research and theory conducted on the relationship, after which we formulate the potential problems and construct our research questions that will be addressed in the analysis and discussion sections. In the methodology section we describe and justify the methods used for the research in this dissertation. We reason our qualitative approach and go into detail of the data collection process and how the analysis was conducted. In the methodology section we also present the organisations and interviewees that participated in our research. In the analysis section we analyse the data material from the interviews, make sense of the data in light of theory and address each research question individually. In the discussion section that follows, we present our results and discuss how our findings relate to the academic literature on the relationship on self-organisation and creativity. This dissertation is rounded off with a brief discussion of the limitations of this dissertation, suggestions for future research and a summary of the findings along with concluding remarks. 2 1. Literature review The literature review consists of three main parts. In the first section we review the literature surrounding the first component of this dissertation: self-organisation. We define self- organisation, present the predictable outcomes related to it and the necessary supportive structures and processes for the realisation of said outcomes, along with a critical reflection of self-organisation. In the next main section we review the second central element of this dissertation: creativity. We will discuss creativity in an organisational context and provide a critical point of view along with a discussion of outcomes of creativity. The creativity section is concluded with a review of ways to influence creativity through different structures and processes. The final section of the literature review constitutes the backbone of this dissertation. Here we combine the two previous topics and review the prior research and theoretical formulations on the relationship between self-organisation and creativity. After a review of prior research into the topic, we formulate the potential problems and construct the research questions of this dissertation.